Yeah, pretty much sums it up for me. (By the way, I didn’t cherry-pick; those are the top mentions on Technorati right now.) Generally, I don’t mind redesigns; I think I’m usually pretty good about detaching from my nostalgia for familiar layouts. But the new Slate aches my kidneys. It is so bad.

– The typography. Oh. My. God. FontAssault.com is available. Their little graphical story module just isn’t going to work anymore if every other font on the page is going to be fugly.

– The color scheme. I didn’t know you could actually make grey clash with grey.

– The (dis)organization. It’s like they just stuffed anything wherever it sort of fit. I’m all about overthrowing conventional notions of hierarchy, but Slate skipped unconventional and went straight to fug. Field trip to hell: disable your stylesheet and take a look at it.

– Information overload. Every headline is now in at least three different places on the front page. Slate just does not have that much content; I’m sorry.

– “?reload=true.” Slate is NOT The New York Times. I don’t need to see the same tired stories refresh every 2 minutes.

– Overall incoherence. Does any single design element carry through any other part of the page at all? With every menu, it’s like they wanted to reinvent the menu. With every headline, it’s like they wanted to reinvent the headline. And have they ever heard of a grid?

Okay, but seriously, when was Slate *ever* organized? I’ve never known where anything is on that site, or had any sense of its overall structure. And while past performance does not excuse future results, it’s not like it’s a huge step DOWN.

I feel you on the incoherence, though. I think we might actually be looking at three redesigns.